In contrast, the previous evening 200 people stood in protest outside the suburban Minneapolis dental practice of 55-year-old Walter Palmer, calling for him to be extradited to Zimbabwe to face charges of taking part in an illegal hunt.
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And Cecil, the lion killed by an American hunter in Zimbabwe, left behind many young cubs.
Zimbabwe has started extradition proceedings and hopes the United States will cooperate, said Oppah Muchinguri, the African nation’s environment minister.
Also on Sunday, officials dismissed a report of the shooting death of a male lion who was a companion of Cecil, a well-known lion killed alleged to have been by American hunter Dr. Walter Palmer, a Minnesota dentist, in early July.
Cecil, who had a distinctive black mane, was a popular tourist attraction at the park and was also wearing a tracking collar as part of a University of Oxford research project.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service, who are investigating the alleged poaching had already made “multiple efforts” to contact the Minnesota dentist, said in a statement posted on Twitter they had been “voluntarily contacted by a rep of Dr Palmer”.
Bronkhorst was released on $1,000 bail after appearing in court in Hwange, about 435 miles (700 kilometers) west of the capital Harare, according to his defense lawyer, Givemore Muvhiringi.
Despite global media coverage of Cecil’s killing, the big cat’s untimely demise has gone largely unnoticed in Zimbabwe, where average annual income is just over $US1000 ($1370) and unemployment is higher than 80 per cent.
But I’ve seen the Internet freak out about quite a few things in my day, and so I kept circling back to the question raised by Jared Keller in the Pacific Standard the afternoon that the scandal broke: “Does the Internet really care about Cecil the lion?” Zimbabwean Prosecutor General Johannes Tomana said it would be hard to force Palmer to return to the country for trial. In the US, a petition to the White House had collected 172,000 signatures in support of extradition as of Friday morning.
The landowner allegedly allowed the hunt to be conducted without a lion quota and without the necessary permit, Muchinguri said.
Zimbabwe has said it wants to extradite Palmer to face poaching charges.
Given the account of Zimbabwe conservation officials – that Cecil was illegally lured from his sanctuary, shot with an arrow and then tracked for 40 hours before being shot, skinned and decapitated – the outrage is understandable. “We never hear them speak out when villagers are killed by lions and elephants in Hwange”. That program is so badly managed that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service suspended imports of elephant trophies from that country in 2014 and again in 2015.
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The US Bureau of Fisheries and Wildlife forms the list that included the African lion to the list in October last year due to environmental loss and the rapidly mounting threats facing the feline. The vote was non-binding, but expressed serious concern over the steady rise of illegal animal hunting and urged member states to consider it a “serious crime”.
